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For man, and especially the Sage, is not the Couplement of
soul and body: the proof is that man can be disengaged from the
body and disdain its nominal goods.
It would be absurd to think that happiness begins and ends with
the living-body: happiness is the possession of the good of life:
it is centred therefore in Soul, is an Act of the Soul- and not
of all the Soul at that: for it certainly is not characteristic
of the vegetative soul, the soul of growth; that would at once
connect it with the body.
A powerful frame, a healthy constitution, even a happy balance of
temperament, these surely do not make felicity; in the excess of
these advantages there is, even, the danger that the man be
crushed down and forced more and more within their power. There
must be a sort of counter-pressure in the other direction,
towards the noblest: the body must be lessened, reduced, that the
veritable man may show forth, the man behind the appearances.
Let the earth-bound man be handsome and powerful and rich, and so
apt to this world that he may rule the entire human race: still
there can be no envying him, the fool of such lures. Perhaps such
splendours could not, from the beginning even, have gathered to
the Sage; but if it should happen so, he of his own action will
lower his state, if he has any care for his true life; the
tyranny of the body he will work down or wear away by inattention
to its claims; the rulership he will lay aside. While he will
safeguard his bodily health, he will not wish to be wholly
untried in sickness, still less never to feel pain: if such
troubles should not come to him of themselves, he will wish to
know them, during youth at least: in old age, it is true, he will
desire neither pains nor pleasures to hamper him; he will desire
nothing of this world, pleasant or painful; his one desire will
be to know nothing of the body. If he should meet with pain he
will pit against it the powers he holds to meet it; but pleasure
and health and ease of life will not mean any increase of
happiness to him nor will their contraries destroy or lessen it.
When in the one subject, a positive can add nothing, how can the
negative take away?
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